


Children by adoption and grace

by Aeshna etonensis (GMWWemyss)



Series: Tales From Bent Clough [7]
Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Bent Clough, Care Home, Christmas, Folklore, Gen, History, Leek, Longnor, M/M, OAPs, Peak District, Staffordshire, Staffordshire Moorlands, Storms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-24
Updated: 2017-12-24
Packaged: 2019-02-19 19:34:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13130592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GMWWemyss/pseuds/Aeshna%20etonensis
Summary: A cold coming they had of it....In which Zayn and Liam are delayed in Longnor by storms on Christmas Eve, and unable to get home to Bent Clough before morning.





	Children by adoption and grace

* * *

 

* * *

 

It was Christmas Eve: and, S Agnes’ Day or no S Agnes’ Day, _this_ was a day when any owl for all his feathers should be a-cold. Bitter cold it was.

Wee Joseph was not wantonly to be exposed to such weather; and was not. He – in those days, it was as yet only Wee Joseph in the nursery – was with his two brace of grandparents at Bent Clough, and doubtless poised between excitement to see what Father Christmas should bring, a determination to wait up to hear, if he could, harness bells, and the imminence of a food coma.

As the old ballad of long ago had said (as Pepys had recorded it),

 

 

> _Old Christmaſs is come for to keep open houſe_  
>  _He ſcorns to be guilty of ſtarving a mouſe,_  
>  _Then come boyes and welcome, for dyet the chief_  
>  _Plumb pudding, Gooſe, Capon, minc’t pies & Roaſt beef;_

and Karen and Patricia were not the sort of grans to fail of that standard, or not to do their best to – affectionately – one-up one another in the kitchen.

Zayn and Liam fully expected to be back to Bent Clough in good time (after all, the Met Office had predicted bad weather, which was as near as damn it a guarantee that it should keep clear: they remembered years of drowned ‘barbecue Summers’); but they had a duty to perform, one older than their son.

The care home in Longnor which they were visiting this year was one which was fairly new. Its residents, naturally, were not. And those who had outlived their relations, and, still more, those who wanted more care than relations could provide at home or who had been, frankly, stowed away by their relations as a nuisance, merited having cheer made at this season. Whenever Liam and Zayn were home at Bent Clough at Christmas, they did their level best to contribute to that cheer – in some years, though not this, bringing Niall, and Haz-and-Tommo, with them.

Zayn was well aware of the strict interpretations which imposed strictures upon joining in the celebrations of other faiths, even of those of the Peoples of the Book; he simply did not assent to those interpretations. And Liam, naturally, simply liked Christmas. (Zayn suspected this was a West Midlands thing … it certainly explained Wizzard and Slade.) Zayn himself, always the English master _manqué,_ had, in all likelihood, simply read too much Dickens, and too much Sir Walter:

 

 

> _England was merry England, when_  
>  _Old Christmas brought his sports again._  
>  _’Twas Christmas broach’d the mightiest ale;_  
>  _’Twas Christmas told the merriest tale;_  
>  _A Christmas gambol oft could cheer_  
>  _The poor man’s heart through half the year._

And that, really, was the point: to cheer those in distress, whether their poverty was that of the purse or of the heart, of dosh or of family ties snapped or sundered.

They knew, by now, the core of the regulars, as if the care home were their local.

Old Major Nicholson DSO MiD RM, whose active life – when not On The Ocean Wave – had been spent yomping across the Falklands, patrolling South Armagh, keeping Cyprus quiet, and saving Kurds from Saddam’s vengeance, was, naturally, a mild-mannered and soft-spoken man. Former officers of 40 Commando had little need to raise their voices. As his Distinguished Service Order and Mention in Despatches attested, Vauncey Basil Harpur Nicholson had never been a coward; nor was he now, even in a crippled and too-early old age, worn out by exertions – although he did tend to avoid confrontation with the terror of the care home, the Widow Bossen.

Agnes Bossen, aptly named, was the overbearing widow – some said the cause of death, not by murder but rather by nagging and sheer misery – of a very substantial farmer, and one whose married name was a great deal more apt even than had been her maiden name, of, ‘Steel’. She had a good deal of brass – in both senses – and an exaggerated idea of her own position; she had a dicky heart the possession of which she deployed as a weapon; she was possessed of a sense of entitlement larger even than her tendency to self-indulgence; and she had also, in consequence of these traits, three children, and a daughter-in-law and two sons-in-law, who had seized with alacrity on her regular claims that ‘her heart wouldn’t bear’ whatever it was she didn’t wish done, and on that basis put her in a care home they did not care to visit.

She was the sort of woman inevitable referred to, uncharitably, and when out of her hearing, as, ‘Hyacinth’.

Aggie Bossen (typically, she insisted upon, ‘Agnes’, if she allowed the use of her Christian name at all) was, in fact, rather a pathetic and pitiable woman, and Liam at least, with the charity that was so marked in him, excused much in her. She’d lost – if old snaps told true – such brief prettiness she’d had as a young woman; she was not, actually, clever; and there was a look in her eyes, in old photographs as now in the flesh, which showed, when her guard was down, that she knew it, and went in daily terror of being found out.

Will Belfield, having dealt with the old horror for yonks, regarded her with tolerant dislike, and a little pity … so long as she laid off The Major. Will was rather younger, a sturdily independent man of solid farming stock, and might have lived at home even as a widower, and damned independently at that, had he not, as a C/Sgt in the old Staffords, left bits of himself in the desert wadis on the Saudi-Kuwait frontier in 1991, during Operation GRANBY. ‘Colour’ Belfield had, since arriving at the care home, appointed himself a sort of superior batman and orderly, despite his senior rank and appointment, to Major Nicholson. The Major might be, on the one hand, a bloody bootneck; on the other, he was DSO, which commanded respect; but most of all, he was a Nicholson, and a Harpur, and a Crewe, and his mother, a Larner. And there was a reason why the focal point of nearby Leek was the Nicholson War Memorial, which Sir Arthur and Lady Nicholson had had built as a monument to their son Basil, killed as a subaltern at Ypres, and to all those local lads who died for King and Country in the Great War.

Nan Manifold was far and away the eldest of those at the care home. She was no one’s nan in the body – though she was called, nowadays, as, ‘Nan’, as a courtesy –; and she had always been so called, having been named ‘Anne’ quite ninety-three years prior. She was however, in the spirit, the nan of a very great company of folk, over many generations: for Miss Manifold had, bar a few crowded years as a Leading Wren Telegraphist (in which capacity she’d helped hunt down _Bismarck_ ), spent all her blameless life, from her early adulthood, as a Methodist Local Preacher. She was failing a bit nowadays, but remained conversable and very dear, and had even now a fair bit of her wits about her.

Zayn and Liam lived in dread of the day when one or another of the old dears should be no more, even the Widow Bossen. They’d already, since last Christmas, lost old Edward Tunnicliff, that Moorlands farmer of the old school, and Dorothy his wife, and Betty Edge who’d been the postmistress and shopkeeper for decades and had always been able to recall with perfect clarity the Big Freeze of ’62 – ’63, and the big postwar concerts in Buxton, and the wounding of local commerce when Dr Beeching’s axe fell. And just a month prior Dick Trafford had died, and with him, the sharp memory of legendary years for Staffordshire CCC and Derbyshire CCC, legends largely local in the days when Derbs were the rabbits of the County game, and Staffs was as it remains a Minor County. But Dick Trafford – ‘Old’ Trafford, to his amusement – had been only in name a High Street butcher, though he’d carried on the trade for years, earning respect and a tidy profit: Dick Trafford had been, fundamentally, a lover of the game, and had never missed a match he could possibly attend. He’d been there for the bowling exploits of John Steele, David’s brother, in the Sixties, before Steele J had joined a First Class side by taking a Leicestershire contract; and he’d been there when Derbyshire, for a brief and shining moment, though the batting was utter pants, had Venkat taking every wicket and leading a bowling attack that kept Derbs respectable.

And there were a score of others – Mr and Mrs Walwyn, the widow Sigley, Jack Bestwick, and all – who might not be there next Christmas … or this coming New Year, or Easter, or Midsummer, or 8 January and every fortnight’s visit after.

Canon Woldridge, who was just leaving, smiled cheerily at them as they arrived. He was effectively retired, but always took the tricky bits of the rota during the feasts of the church, freeing up parochial incumbents whose duties were to their parishes in those seasons. It was bitter cold; but the Canon’s approval was always warming, if mostly laconic and sometimes silent. They seemed always to meet him in doorways, as they or he were rushing in or out....

* * *

 

Mrs Bossen had been precisely as tiresome and domineering as ever, and no more; Nan Manifold as sweet; Meg and George Walwyn as hearty (and as free with old farmhouse receipts: Ashbourne gingerbread, Yeomanry pudding, lamb pie); the Major, and Mr Belfield, as quietly welcoming.

Everything had gone to plan, and very nearly to time, for all Aggie Bossen’s prosing interminably on and Jack Bestwick’s falling asleep in the midst of conversation, only to wake and smile sheepishly and wait for them to start over from when he’d first nodded off.

What was unexpected was the extraordinary fact that the Met Office had actually got a forecast more or less right.

It was yet clear as a bell and cold as charity in Longnor; but a look at the near horizon was confirmation enough of what Geoff and Yaser said – and Trisha and Karen said at rather greater length – when, as they were making their way to the door to the car park, Liam and Zayn switched their ’phones – politely switched off while visiting the OAPS – back on. From Hollinsclough to Fawfieldhead, and assuredly at Bent Clough, everything Westwards of Longnor was already blotted very nearly out by a thick, cold rain that ought by rights to have been snow or sleet: and with no signs of stopping.

The temperature had dropped steadily, and was dropping yet, at 1°. And the bitter iron wind was rising, even as the flooding rains came down so copiously as hardly to be stirred from the vertical whatever the wind. Harry, like so many laypeople, had a marked tendency to refer to the Shropshire, Cheshire, and Staffordshire Plain merely as, ‘the Cheshire Plain’; and he commonly did so in rather proprietary tones. He had done better this night had he disclaimed it; for it was performing its ancient function of funnelling dirty weather from the Irish Sea much further inland than should otherwise be the case.

This was the sort of Winter storm that should blow slates off farmhouse roofs and Methodists off Mow Cop; race down the cloughs, drown Manifold and Dove, rake the deeply dissected ridges-and-valleys, and fall like breakers upon Chrome Hill and Parkhouse Hill, Aldery Cliff and High Wheeldon, just over Beggar’s Bridge and the River Manifold from the town.

They could see that for themselves, as the almost wall of cold rain, a few hundred yards west of the market town and moving inexorably and at speed towards the Buxton and Leek Roads, was already nearly upon them. Already, too, the Upper Manifold was blotted out, and The Roaches and Hen Cloud and the Ramshaw Rocks were invisible as they had not been in the clear starry night when they’d started for Longnor.

* * *

 

‘Joe –’

‘Is asleep,’ said Yaser, crisply. The grandparents were quite evidently clustered around the ’phone on speaker even as they were clustered ’round the Aga and the kitchen table.

‘Yow may be able,’ said Geoff, ‘if this gews on through, to be here afore he wakes in the mornin’. But if not … we’ll tell Our Joe yow was called on to help Father Christmas, on account o’ this storm. We bay havin’ yow out on the hoss-road in this, anyroadup. Yow waits for it to blow through: us’ll take care of the bab.’

From this, and, all the more, from their mums’ minatory threats and warnings against risking driving in this weather, there was, they knew, no appeal.

* * *

 

They made it back indoors just as the opaque, beaded curtain of sheeting rain reached the car park. Mrs Critchlow smiled ruefully as she came out of her office to commiserate with them.

‘I’m sorry, I am that. Of course we can put you up for the night – and there’re things to spare for you, razors and soap and tooth powder and toothbrushes: we can make you comfortable. And pyjamas and slippers and robes, come to that; and we’ll run your things through the wash overnight. But I’m truly sorry you can’t make it home to the wee lad. I –’

Liam chuckled, his eyes crinkling. ‘We know, Mrs C. But … at least there’s room at the inn, and no mere manger.’

* * *

 

‘Stranded … and all on account of visiting us? Shame, that,’ said motherly Mrs Walwyn. The alerter OAPs were all of them sitting in the warmth of the common room with their unexpectedly stopping guests, as wind and rain rattled the windows. Liam and Zayn had been effectively and efficiently stripped of their cold clothes and wet shoes and trousers by Mrs Critchlow at her most Matron-ly, and packed off to shower and to change into warm flannel pyjamas and thick dressing gowns and luxurious insulated slippers, all before they were allowed to join the company.

‘Aye,’ said Will Belfield. ‘Spendin’ Christmas with a lot o’ old crocks instead o’ with your lad.’ Mrs Bossen sniffed: she did not care to be included in the designation of ‘old crocks’.

‘Good God,’ said Major Nicholson, suddenly. ‘And this’d be your boy’s first Christmas at your place here since he’s old enough really to take notice!’ This was true: the Christmases in the first few years after Joe’s arrival had not included Bent Clough, and even for the past few he’d been too young really to be aware of it very clearly. ‘That’s damnable.’

‘You’d the same experience, Sir,’ said Will.

‘Hmm. Perfectly true, Colour; but one expects that as a goodish possibility when serving in HM Forces, as well _you_ know. Pity it should happen to the lads in this fashion, when all they meant to do was visit, charitably, the decrepit.’

Before Mrs Bossen could protest against any ascription to her of decrepitude, Jack Bestwick opened an eye and said, ‘Well, it’s a mercy he’ll hardly remember it. Babbies is like us oldsters: the memory’s not at its best. And it’d be a sight worser if he was to remember, in after years, this as the night he lost his parents in a road smash.’

Nan Manifold nodded. ‘There’s allus a mercy in things if you look trustfully at them. Isn’t it so, Major?’

Major Nicholson was a staunch Churchman, but he was by no means too proud to agree with a Nonconformist. ‘That’s quite true. When my father was killed – Aden: he was an officer of 45 Commando – I was too young really to understand. But, when my son fell, in HERRICK....’

* * *

 

The panacea relied on by HM Forces for anything short of a stomach wound was precisely the same soothing remedy as Mrs Critchlow prescribed on such a night as this. The company were on their fourth pot of tea. It had not flowed as freely as had reminiscence, which had by now long since gone well back and beyond mere living memory.

‘... Churnet Valley. By gum, he was. Well, the whole District’s full o’ hidey-holes for a highwayman, let alone if he’s the sympathy of the poor.’

‘Aye,’ said Colour; ‘but. _But._ As some more recent insurgents ha’ found out, that doesn’t go but so far. The farmers didn’t like it any more than the Harpur-Crewes an’ the County, and – let alone the farmers’d’ve been the jury and the Major’s people, the Bench – they weren’t all that particular in them days about tryin’ a highwayman so as to hang him in chains if they could catch him at it and shoot him down.’

‘Quite,’ said the Major; ‘but it wasn’t the law or the outraged local citizens put paid to Black George. Just as well, I suppose. It was all long before the Nicholsons came here from Yorkshire –:’ he turned to Zayn and explained, ‘That side of the family were mill-owners; it was Sir Arthur, in ’09, got his foot in with a K’ – ‘but they, hard-handed though they were, were fairly liberal magistrates and High Sheriffs.

‘Sir Henry – the sixth baronet; his mother was the duke of Rutland’s daughter, and he married the daughter of the earl of Warwick – and his son Sir Harry, though … well, typical Harpurs and Crewes, really, even in the Shrievalty. When Sir George was High Sheriff – he was a strong Churchman –, he cancelled the Assize Ball on the ground of “how cruel and heartless it appeared that any person should be found engaged in worldly mirth and amusement on so solemn an occasion, when so many poor creatures were trembling on the eve of their trial, perhaps for their lives”. You can see why he only served one term in the Commons: too conscientious to be an MP. They were even more corrupt in those days than the one we’re saddled with now. But … no, it wasn’t the local folk or the local magistrates put paid to Black George of Churnet.

‘Was it, Miss Manifold?’

Nan Manifold smiled, gently. ‘Nay, Major. It were Grace, pure Grace.’

Will Belfield chuckled. ‘Don’t say it weren’t, Nan, but it weren’t only the prayin’ sort of Grace as did it. There were a fair bit o’ the “Sword o’ the Lord an’ o’ Gideon” business in it.’

He turned to Liam and Zayn and explained. ‘Soon as the Primitive Methodists began holdin’ their great out of doors revivals on Mow Cop – 1800, it began, and the biggest ’un it were in 1807, and they split off then –, why, when there’d be a meetin’, the Pot’ries’d come marchin’. Half Stoke, three-quarters o’ Burslem, all Hanley, marchin’ – they was poor folk and artisans, mostly, they didden ride but on Shanks’ mare –, marchin’ up … to Zion, at Mow Cop.

‘Well, Black George, seemin’, thought as these were easy prey, women and childer and poor men, on foot an’ him on hossback, an’ they pi-jawin’ folk with Bibles instead o’ pistol-balls. Rackon he didden look to make much from any one o’ the walkers, but figgered as he’d herd ’em like sheep and plunder ’em in job lots, an’ it may be thought as they’d be bringin’ offerin’s for the work o’ God, and alms as they’d saved up all the year.

‘Well. These was the men as druv the dray-hosses for the potteries and shovelled the coal for the kilns and wrassled tuns an’ vats o’ wet clay an’ all, and turned their wheels for to make Mr Dudson’s pots, an’ Mr Wedgwood’s an’ Mr Booth’s an’ Mr Beswick’s an’ all.

‘No, they didden kill Black George, or hang him. But they showed him the error o’ his ways … to within a ninch o’ his life. After that, he were a reformed character – in fact, by the end o’ his days he were a Lay Preacher hisself.

‘Mind you,’ chuckled Colour, ‘’e had en comin’, thinkin’ as one highwayman had the whip-hand o’ thousands o’ folk. Why, the comp’nies as come up Mow Cop from the Pot’ries … I doubt me we’d more folk gather for Royal Visits.’

* * *

 

The howl of the wind was almost drowned out by the rattled of icy rain against the windows.

Withindoors, Zayn knew, their chance company of the night were between them unrolling the history of all England, not this corner only of her, as they might unroll a tapestry.

The Major smiled. ‘Yes, the year before the Great War broke out, Their Majesties – King George and Queen Mary, you know – stopped with Sir Arthur and Marianne, Lady Nicholson, at Highfield. It was the last hour, really, of the high Victorian noon and the soft Edwardian eventide which had followed.’

‘Aye,’ said Mrs Sigley; ‘my great-gran was called in as an extra housemaid – Mrs Walwyn’s great-aunt, you know. Oh, half the District were recruited to help out. Mrs Bossen’s great-great-grandmother –’

‘All the loyal villagers,’ broke in Agnes Bossen, not eager to associate herself with domestic service even ancestrally, ‘volunteered to aid Lady Nicholson.’

‘They did,’ said Mrs Walwyn, with a perfectly innocent and straight face: ‘in their stations. And Mrs Steel had been a very smart and capable housemaid at Highfield in the ’90s, before she married the second undergardener and opened a shop. They were main lucky to have her back for the Royal Visit. It was quite an undertakin’.’

‘I doubt,’ said the Widow Sigley, ‘as it mightn’t ha’ been even more of a crowd then a Mow Cop Meetin’ in the high days; mebbe the biggest thing ever.’

‘Mm,’ said the Major. ‘I expect Queen Elizabeth’s progresses – Elizabeth 1st, I mean – may have outdone it. Damned near bankrupted the Bainbridge side of the family – in fact, it’s one reason they sold up to the Harpurs after. Though I will say, Rodger Bainbridge, who wasn’t as extreme a Protestant as most of that side were, and who’s my direct ancestor, his granddaughter later marryin’ a younger in-come Harpur spare, had already lost a packet in Good Queen Bess’ service. Got a wife out of it, mind, wherever she came from. No one’s quite sure was she Russian, Turkish, Moroccan, or Indian: Rodger, poor fellow, managed to get sent by the Crown on missions to the Tsar, the Barbary States, Constantinople, and even the first tentative trade mission to Akbar the Great, to try and supplant the Portuguese.

‘Hosting Bess Tudor was an even more expensive proposition, by all accounts – in fact, we declined at the second time of asking, on the grounds of expense. Or so they say....’

‘Ah,’ said Mr Walwyn. ‘They was early Puritan, the Bainbridges.... What was that about Sir Henry Green an’ Lud’s Church?’

‘There you have me,’ smiled the Major. ‘Lud’s Church may or mayn’t be the chapel of the Green Knight in the Arthur tales.’ Zayn sat up straight and became very alert. ‘But that cave or chasm _was_ a secret Lollard meeting place, and place of worship, well before the Reformation; and the tale of a knight named Harry _Green_ ’s getting lost there and delaying a Tudor Royal Progress … well. You must make up your own minds.’

* * *

 

Liam and Zayn had asked Mrs Critchlow to call them at five, so that – should the weather have moderated – they might get home, with luck, to Bent Clough before Wee Joseph, their own miracle child of adoption and grace, woke to a Christmas morning.

And the OAPs, though clearly willing and eager to yarn all night, wanted rest as well.

It was just on midnight when Liam chuckled.

Zayn shot him a sleepy kitten’s glare. ‘If you find it funny that the only night we have alone and without sprog-and-family is being spent somewhere we can’t shag....’ Zayn carefully refrained from considering how fortunate they were when set next to the OAPs who had neither parent nor child nor family at this season.

‘No,’ said Liam: ‘ _that_ bit’s just tragic.’ All the same, with his head spinning, stuffed with tales of water-hags and eccentrics, misers and ghosts, Saxons, Vikings, Normans, hangmen, highwaymen, the Fair Folk and elvish gold, cursed stones, Robin Hood, Izaak Walton, the fugitive Charles 2d, and Sir Gawain, it was actually possible that he’d have been distracted even from sex in any case.

‘Look out the window,’ said he.

Zayn looked. The last of the storm was past; the rain was slackened; and – for all that ice overnight was a dangerous possibility – one quarter of the sky had cleared, and in the clear patch amongst the clouds there shone a single star.

‘Happy Christmas, love,’ said Liam, and kissed his husband. ‘And come morning, we’ll be home with Our Kid.’

Zayn hid a smile, and cuddled Liam, disposing them together to sleep.

 

> _Oh! here come I, old father Christmas, welcome or not...._

* * *

 

❦

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Christmas, you lot.


End file.
